Standard Streams

When developing command line applications, I rely heaily on the standard streams provided by POSIX-y operating systems, defaulting to leveraging redirection rather than implementing alternative file management logic. This typically allows for less and blissfully ignorant code that is readily usable for scripting.

One caveat that pops up every so often (and which I just got dragged into a discussion about) is some of the less obvious behaviors around the buffers that enable that functionality, where a good overview is provided here.

Over the years this nuance has reminded me of itself over the years, typically as behaviors that vary across execution environments. One of the most common but easily addressed results (and the topic of the mentioned conversation) is messages being output in an order that differs from when they were putatively written. I’ve also encountered more interesting quirks such as buffers being flushed in ways that data is broken in undesirable ways (such as message seeming to be trucated with the next message starting with the remainder), and programs hanging due to the underlying buffers being filled and not properly consumed when passing a large message.

Ultimately being aware that such considerations exist should significantly facilitate working through resulting issues, but many of the facilities are easy to take for granted and therefore without some awareness it can be particularly perplexing when some of the realities that underlie the abstractions rear their heads (particularly if there are differences due to environmental factors)